Passing on Adventure

The other day a friend and I got into a debate about the “Adventure Pass.” For those of you who are not in the know, the “Adventure Pass” is a program adopted by several southern California National Forests that requires forest users to purchase a “pass” ($5 per day or $35 annually) for the privilege of parking an automobile in the national forest. Given the geography, development patterns, and lack of viable public transportation options, driving to the affected national forests is the only practical method of getting there for most folks. As a result, the “Adventure Pass” effectively functions as an additional fee imposed for the use of your national forests. The program began as a pilot, but has predictably become a permanent fixture of the national forest landscape, at least in the Los Padres, Angeles, San Bernardino, and Cleveland National Forests.

I am virulently opposed to the “Adventure” Pass for a variety of reasons. One of the things that government should do with our tax dollars is provide and maintain public space without imposing additional “user” fees, whether that space is a national forest or a municipal park. Programs which force, under threat of substantial monetary penalties, those who use public facilities (whether by choice or out of necessity) to pay an additional fee for that use is nothing but a tip of the hat to the selfish ideology, often espoused by those who have already benefitted from one or more public institutions or programs, that “no one but me should gain benefit from my tax dollars.”

Beyond that, the Adventure Pass program, when coupled with the “war on drugs,” has caused unintended (or is that intended?) collateral damage. Whereas at one time forest rangers were trained naturalists who would hike the trails focusing on the flora and fauna of the forest, now they are nothing more than glorified traffic cops and vice officers who drive the roads prowling for parking fees and collars.

My friend, on the other hand, is a big supporter of the Adventure Pass. He views the pass as a magnanimous and unique opportunity to contribute additional dollars to the public fisc so that he can “share” the forest experience with others. Although I think that position silly, it is the catalyst for the additional fee generating schemes that I am proposing here today. This, of course, is not an exclusive list of possible programs that can be modeled after the Adventure Pass program, but it’s a good start and is eminently doable given the current political climate in the country.

• The Love Pass- this is a $35 annual fee that will imposed by each municipality on each tennis player for the use of public tennis courts. The fees collected will be used to pay for the cost of lights, nets, general maintenance, and a Court Officer who will be deputized and will carry both a loaded weapon and pepper spray. The Officer will be tasked with checking players for Love Passes, writing tickets to Love Pass scofflaws, keeping order on the courts, and searching users at whim and without probable cause for contraband. All Court Officers will be recruited from the local Sheriff's Department and will be required to have absolutely no knowledge of, or interest in tennis.



• The Velo Pass- this is a $35 annual fee that will be imposed by every municipality upon each road bike rider for the privilege of riding a bicycle on city maintained streets. The fee will be used to defray the cost of bike lanes that are now paid for principally by motorists. Significant monetary penalties for non-compliance will apply.



• The Metro Pass- this new $35 annual fee above and beyond the basic ticket cost will be charged to all public transportation users to defray the costs of public transportation now being subsidized by non-public transportation user tax dollars. A separate fee will be imposed by each transportation authority, meaning that users will need a separate Metro Pass for buses and commuter rails. There will be no exceptions or discounts for the economically disadvantaged who are supping at the public transportation trough, but a combined bus/rail Metro Pass will be available at the discounted rate of $65.



• The Reading Pass- this is a new $35 annual fees assessed against all public library users. The fees will be used to cover the cost of acquiring knowledge from a taxpayer funded library facility. It will also fund a Reading Enforcement Agent whose primary function will be to check for Reading Passes and to write tickets to those attempting to ride the knowledge coattails of other paying patrons. The fee will be assessed against each library patron, but a family pass will be available at the rate of $30 per family member.



• The Play Pass- this is a $35 annual fee that will be assessed by each municipality and/or county against all public park users for the privilege of stepping foot in the public parks. Note that this fee will be separate and distinct from the annual Love Pass which will assessed separately. It is also separate and distinct from the Softball Pass (a per player fee, not a per team fee), the Soccer Pass (again, per player), the Skate Pass (a combined skateboard and roller-blading pass will be available for $65), and a general Lolligagging Pass that applies to all other park activities. Special kiosks, funded by Play Pass fees, will be constructed at each park entrance and staffed by enforcement agents who will check users for Play Passes before park entrance is granted.



• The Sand and Surf Pass- this is a $35 annual fee that will be charged to all public beach users for the privilege of stepping foot on the public beaches. Note that this fee will be in addition to applicable parking, day use, and camping fees. Armed enforcement agents will strategically occupy existing lifeguard towers so that they can apprehend, with force if necessary, moochers and freeloaders who attempt to enjoy the beach without paying their fair share.



• And finally, the Dog Shit Pass- this is a $35 annual fee (in addition to licensing fees) that will be assessed against dog owners for the privilege of walking a canine on public property. The fee will fund dog parks, fecal clean up, and a Dog Shit Enforcement Agent who will have the authority to club dog owners into submission if they fail to clean up after their pooch. Please note the each municipality will require its own Dog Shit Pass so if you plan on traveling with your dog, your annual contributions to Dog Shit Passes may be significantly higher than just $35.

These are just a few of the new fees, modeled after the very popular and successful Adventure Pass, that I think could be proposed to public officials in the very near future. However, public facilities users should not fret about the potential for having to pay these additional new fees as all money collected will be deposited into the public fisc. Thus, those who pay these fees can rest comfortably in the knowledge that they are both carrying their own substantial weight and sharing our public facilities with other users.

Poor People Food

For nearly five decades worth of Christmases now, I’ve endured Nat King Cole crooning about “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose.” But in all that time, I have never actually roasted a chestnut. In fact, I haven’t even seen anyone roasting chestnuts. That’s probably as much a function of the culture in which I was raised as it is my belief that roasting chestnuts was a trend of the past, a treat as modern as nuts in oranges in your Christmas sock.

But it turns out that roasted chestnuts are not the ancient relic that I thought perhaps they were. For instance, they are still a common “street food” in some parts of the world, including Turkey, where in Istanbul vendors hawk “Kestane kebab” from carts in both popular tourist districts and working class neighborhoods. I am told that warm chestnuts, roasted black, and served in a paper bag are also readily available from street vendors throughout London. My guess is that the same holds true for other majors cities throughout Europe and Asia Minor.

I’ve discovered that chestnuts were introduced into Europe by way of Sardis in present day Turkey. They were initially referred to as “Sardinian nuts” and for millennia, served as a staple food for the peoples who populated southern Europe, Turkey, and south-western Asia. In these regions of the world, chestnuts largely replaced cereals which could not grow well in the Mediterranean climate and soils. Until the introduction of the potato, the meat of the chestnut sustained whole communities who used it to make cake or bread.

Then, at some stage and for reasons unknown to me, the chestnut fell out of favor. It was maligned as “poor people food.” People abandoned “chestnut bread” because its flour did not rise. Chestnuts, it was said, gave a “sallow complexion.”

Despite all of this besmirching, and the embarrassment and shame that would invariably result from eating “poor people food,” we decided it was time to roast some chestnuts. Lacking an open flame, we didn’t so much “roast” them as we did “bake” them. Essentially, we cranked the oven up to about 400 degrees, scored the chestnuts, placed them on a baking sheet, and popped them in the oven until the shells split and were a deep mahogany color. Not exactly street authentic, but it was a worthy attempt and it worked well enough.

Out of the shell, roasted chestnuts were not at all what I expected. Being in the nut mindset, I was prepared for crunch. What I got was something that was nutty and slightly sweet, but with the consistency of a baked potato. Had we actually done some roasting, I suspect we would have added a little smoke flavor to the taste profile, but they were delicious nonetheless.

Beyond the taste and consistency, the thing that surprised me the most about roasted chestnuts was how filling they were. After having just a few, I felt as if I had eaten an entire meal. Maybe that ability to satisfy fully partially explains their previous popularity as “poor people food,” even though from a nutritional standpoint chestnuts have fewer calories per edible gram than many other nuts and dried fruits.

Given how filling (and, I presume, versatile) they are, I think I can understand why roasted chestnuts are popular “poor people food.” Although there is probably a good explanation, what I don’t grasp is how or why “poor people food” became and conintues to this day to be associated with Christmas holiday tradition in America. I’m sure by that statement that I’m advertising my historical and culinary ignorance, but so be it. For the moment, I’m satisfied to have simply experienced the gastonomical pleasure of the roasted Sardinian nut.

Afiyet olsun!

Economic Hitmen Under My Bed

Either I’m going to start seeing economic hitmen under my bed, or the narrative is more common, the strategy more versatile than I ever imagined. That idea is being fostered by a piece titled A Christmas Message From America’s Rich penned by Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone in which he highlights the indifference, nay the complete disdain that America’s elites have for the 99%. In the course of that article, Taibbi skewers, among others, Jaime Dimon of Chase Bank infamy for complaining that people hate him because he’s rich and successful. Taibbi rightly points out that people don’t hate Dimon because he’s wealthy and successful. They hate him because he and his banking buddies are a bunch of conniving, unrepentant, pricks. As evidence of this, Taibbi points to happenings in Jefferson County, Alabama.

“That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.

Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.

Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?”

Translation: Dimon’s bank handed Jefferson County the means to commit financial suicide and then bribed its leadership to pull the trigger. And who primarily benefitted from Jefferson County’s mountain of lethal and bloody debt? Chase Bank, of course.

But wait, there’s more. Chase also pulled a similar stunt it seems with the Greeks. Again, Taibbi:

“Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase ‘helped’ Greece mask its debt problem for years by selling a similar series of swaps to the Greek government. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.

In other words, Chase knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.

Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?”

That, my friends, is exactly why guys like Dimon are now despised to the point that they must fend off vitriolic attacks by “imbeciles” in the debtor class. But that really is neither my point nor current fixation. No, my interest in Taibbi’s Rolling Stone rant is the evidence it contains of the economic hitmen narrative at play. The strategy employed by Chase Bank in its dealing with both Jefferson County, Alabama and Greece is the exact same strategy, writ small, that John Perkins persuasively claims was employed by the United States to financially enslave developing nations. It is the strategy I see being employed by banks and educational institutions to financially subjugate students for years on end through massive student loan debt. And it is a strategy that I now suspect could very well be at play in a variety of other contexts where the promise of a better financial tomorrow derives not from hard word, intelligence and talent, but from debt instruments hyped and sold by economic hitmen like Jamie Dimon and his bank.

Higher Education: A Railway to Peonage

One of the many things that resonated with me the first time I read Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States was the idea that our institutions of higher education in this country, particularly the Harvards, Yales, Stanfords, Carnegie Mellons, and Vanderbilts of the system, were established not so much to further the goal of an educated populace, but to spit out a class of professionals and semi-professionals who could and would at once both serve the elites and act as a buffer against the unwashed and uninformed masses. In less refined terms, Zinn’s suggestion (or at least my interpretation) was that these degreed and credentialed folks were being groomed by our nation’s top colleges and universities to function as the plutocracy’s bitches. Being a bitch myself in that regard (i.e., a degreed professional), I’d really never consciously considered that possibility, although the idea certainly was intriguing. In fact, it was more than intriguing. Now that Zinn had challenged my conventional view on the matter, I had to admit that the theory just might have substantial merit.

Perhaps because I subconsciously didn’t want to confront it, or maybe because I was just being intellectually lazy, I didn’t follow Zinn’s strand of thought any further. The idea remained, however. In fact, it still comes to the forefront of my thinking every once in awhile, but I always let it slip back into the obscure recesses of my mind where it lays dormant until something triggers another flare-up.

Well, this morning I had a flare-up (call it an epiphany) of major proportions that has given me the clarity of sight that Zinn must have had. The catalyst for my new found vision was an article by Brian McKenna published at Counter Punch titled Student Loan Fury in the Occupy Movement. In a nutshell, the article lays bare the societal and parental lie that burdening students with loan debt in order to obtain a higher education, particularly in the more academic and esoteric fields of study that have no perceived “market value” (i.e., cannot be readily exploited by business to increase profits), will markedly improve one’s position in life. To the contrary, the article demonstrates in rather bleak terms that in many cases, a Masters or Ph.D degree is nothing more than a train ride to peonage, self-doubt, and misery.

Without getting into the reasons for this (the article hints at a general hostility toward certain disciplines and the continued and steady de-funding of our public educational systems), McKenna’s article caused me to immediately think of John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hitman. As Wiki accurately describes it, Hitman is a mea culpa in which Perkins confesses to having been an “economic hit man” for a global engineering services firm that paid him handsomely to:

“convince the political and financial leadership of underdeveloped countries to accept enormous development loans from institutions like the World Bank and USAID. Saddled with debts they could not hope to pay, those countries were forced to acquiesce to political pressure from the United States on a variety of issues. Perkins argues in his book that developing nations were effectively neutralized politically, had their wealth gaps driven wider and economies crippled in the long run.”

And then it hit me and the scales fell from my eyes. The story of higher education in 21st century America is nothing more than the Hitman narrative playing out in a different context. The uneducated students who are misspending their youth by foregoing a misspent youth for a lottery’s chance at attending an Ivy are Perkins’ underdeveloped countries. The universities and the banks which are reaping huge financial returns from the desperate students who can never hope to repay their student loan debt are Perkins’ World Bank and USAID. The political, social and financial elites are the United States in Perkins’ tale who can and will exert leverage on the wage slave graduates in order to effectively neutralize them both politically and economically. And we parents, who have bought into the hype and the promise of success that is supposed to flow magically to our kids from a blue chip educational pedigree, we are Perkins. We are economic hitmen.

I should have seen it before now, but I just didn’t. Up until this moment, I dutifully played the role expected of me by cheerleading for my kids to go the best college they could get into, even if that meant “investing in their future” by loading up on obscene amounts student loan debt. With the assistance of Zinn, McKenna and Perkins, however, I have come to realize the folly and danger of this way of thinking. As a result, I will no longer be complicit. I will no longer propagate the lie that a college degree is worth any investment regardless of amount. I will no longer be an economic hit man for the student loan industry.

A Phrase is Born

Inspired by some ornery, and I presume old, bittertons that frequent a couple of sites I enjoy reading and posting to, I have decided to coin a new phrase. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you "bitter bombing."

Definition: the curmudgeon’s online equivalent to glitter bombing. The act of attacking someone or their post on a blog or website comments page without warning or provocation just because you’re a bitter old bastard that has absolutely nothing constructive to add to the discussion and you enjoy being a complete dick.

Usage example: We were having this really engaging online debate the other day until that douche bag “4skin” showed up and begin bitter bombing everyone. Yeah, that pretty much killed it off.

This Is Where I Leave You

Plain and simply, this is a supurb bit of writing. I wish I had a fraction of the talent that Jonathan Tropper has.

On line at http://www.jonathantropper.com/

Those Were the Days

Saw a post over at OneUtah that got me thinking about the Bush years. It hasn’t even been 12 months since Obama was inaugurated, but already I’m feeling nostalgic for the prior occupant of the White House in an odd sort of way. So, I thought I’d compile a short list of some of my favorite GW moments just for old-time’s sake. Man, those were the days, weren’t they?

(Breaks into song)

Boy the way Steve Miller played
Songs that made the hit parade.
Guys like us we had it made,
Those were the days.

And you knew who you were then,
Girls were girls and men were men,
Mister we could use a man
Like Ronald Reagan again.

Didn't need no welfare state,
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee our old LaBaron ran great.
Those were the days.

In no particular order:

Bush Issues a Pre-Katrina Declaration of Emergency for Louisiana Which Covers the Wrong Parishes

On or about August 25, 2005, President Bush issued a pre-emptive Statement on Federal Emergency Assistance for the State of Louisiana in light of the approaching disaster that was Hurricane Katrina. Problem was the declaration only covered the non-coastal parishes in Louisiana. Those parishes that were near or on the coast, those parishes that would ultimately take the brunt of Katrina’s wrath, were curiously not covered by the emergency declaration. You’re doing a heck-of-a job Brownie!

Bush Massages Merkel

In July of 2006, President Bush attended the G-8 Summit in St. Petersburg along with a cadre of other foreign dignitaries, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the only female in attendance. During the summit, with cameras rolling, Bush approached Merkel from behind while she spoke with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi and gave her a little rub down. A visibly startled and uncomfortable Merkel immediately threw her arms up in the air and then, as the Los Angeles Time reported, charitably “smiled.” The episode went viral and earned the President the title “Groper in Chief” by the blogosphere.



It’s Just a Goddamned Piece of Paper

In late 2005, Republican leaders met with President Bush in the oval office to discuss renewal of the USA Patriot Act. During those discussions, the President was told by the Republican leadership that his unrelenting push to renew some of the more egregious provisions of that Act could carry negative political consequences to which King George reportedly responded, "I don't give a goddamn. I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way." Mr. Bush was then tactfully informed that that some of the Act’s provisions were also constitutionally suspect which evoked this little gem from the top guardian and protector of our Constitution: “Stop throwing the Constitution in my face! It's just a goddamned piece of paper!"

Fool Me Once

And finally, on September 17, 2002, President Bush was giving a speech in Nashville, Tennessee. As was often his style, the President was trying to be folksy and connect with his audience, but his penchant for malapropisms got the better of him resulting in this humorous and now infamous doozy: “There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”



Bonus Feature

Ok, this doesn't involve Bush per se, but since it involves a Bush and it is such a classic, I'm appending it to this post as a bonus feature.

George Herbert Walker Bush Barfs on the Japanese Prime Minister

On January 8, 1992, President George H.W. Bush attended a State dinner along with some 135 other diplomats at the home of the Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. The dinner followed an evening of tennis with Japan’s Emperor described by Time’s Asia correspondent Peter McKillop as “brutal.” “[T]he Crown Prince, to use a Texas term, kicked George Bush's butt on the court. George senior is a pretty competitive guy and almost killed himself trying to cover for his lousy doubles partner, a former U.S. ambassador to Japan....” Apparently, the exertion of the tennis match caught up to the President at the state dinner where he barfed into Prime Minister Miyazawa’s lap and then fainted. The incident coined a new phrase in Japan, Bushu-suru, which means “to do the Bush thing.”

Next up: Obama really takes a bow.